“Our fighting men are makers of slang because they are adventurous individuals and they are not restricted by decorum and their taste is unlimited. Their hunting ground for new terms is in their native tongue as well as foreign. They adopt traditional devices of similitude, making attributes work for the whole. They use hidden resemblances, they know no limitations and have no boundaries. They have substituted far-fetched figures for a hundred literary descriptions, using abbreviations most freely, compositions, formations of words to resemble the sound and picturesque synonyms. Their transfer of proper names into common usage has been so much “duck-soup” (that which is done with ease)…They have enriched the national vocabulary with many new verbs and verb phrases. It must not be forgotten that our fighting men have come from all walks of life, that all sections and divisions of a free social order are represented and each man has brought the peculiar and colorful language of his section of the country with him. Ours is a fighting force of a hundred races and as many creeds speaking a language called American.”

“All service men whether in khaki, blue, or field green are speaking a fresh and vigorous tongue these days, one all their own. What does this new language imply? Some might say: ‘Not much.’ But perhaps they don’t know their history. The new language means a lot. It indicates that all men are united by the words they speak. So the welding value of a fighter’s jargon is nothing to sneeze at.”

—Fighting Talk, by Francis Raymond Meyer, 1942

War invariably births a culture all its own, and with it, a new language. Men are thrown together in close-knit, often boring, sometimes dangerous situations, and the slang they beget is both a product, and a reinforcer, of their camaraderie. Wartime slang creates an “us” vs. “them” dynamic — where them is not only the enemy, but the civilian population back home who cannot fully access the world of the fighting man.

Because of its scale, no war inspired more new slang than World War II. Thousands of new words and phrases were birthed during the Big One, and getting acquainted with them offers a fascinating and often humorous soldier’s-eye-view of the conflict.

Paul Dickson, author of War Slang:American Fighting Words and Phrases Since the Civil War, writes that “wars create great bodies of language that sound as different as do a musket, a M-1, and a Patriot missile.” Yet while the color changes, the subjects that come in for the slang-treatment are fairly timeless: the hardship of missing a girl back home, the risks of mingling with women on the front, the necessity of facing death (often with gallows humor), and of course, the terrible food. Men with jobs far from the action, as well as those in the field who don’t contribute to the esprit de corps — self-important egoists, suck-ups, lazy loafers, and conversational narcissists — earn an abundance of nicknames as well. Finally, chaplains have long been on the receiving end of both ribbing and affection, garnering for themselves a slew of both teasing and endearing monikers.

Below you’ll find just a sampling of the colorful slang used during WWII. Some of the words were around in previous wars, but were revived and popularized during the Big One. Others were brand new phrases, born on the European and Pacific fronts. A good portion of the slang made its way into civilian culture, and continues to be used today, particularly among Greatest Generation grandparents, and even their children.

Some of the slang is of course salty fare, and includes terms now considered derogatory. But as the authors of Words of the Fighting Forces wrote in 1942:

“There are terms appearing herein that will no doubt ‘shock’ the clergy, appeaser, isolationist, and puritan. We offer no apology nor have we deleted a term or terms because of what we feared such a group would do or say. These terms are part of a picturesque and living language of men who live close to earth and closer to death, words of men who fight the battle of free men for our America and her Allies on remote and distant battlefields, who man our ships in dangerous seas and fight up there on higher.”

Enjoy.

A Collection of World War II Slang From the Front

Ack-Ack. Anti-aircraft fire.

Admiral of the Swiss Navy. A self-important person.

Ammo. Ammunition.

All-Out. With full vigor, determination, or enthusiasm.

Armed to the Teeth. Well equipped with firearms; alert; fully prepared; awake to danger.

Armored Cow. Canned milk. Variations: Armored Heifer; Canned Cow.

Army Banjo. Shovel.

Army Chicken. Franks and beans.

Army Strawberries. Prunes.

Asparagus Stick. A submarine’s periscope.

Asthma. The company wit, so-called because he’s full of wheezes (jokes).

AWOL. Absence without official leave.

Awkward Squad. Men who require extra instruction at drill.

Axle Grease. Butter.

BAM. A “broad-assed Marine” (i.e., a female Marine).

Baby. Mustard; from its resemblance to that which comes out of the hind end of an infant.

B-ache/bellyache. To complain.

Bags of Mystery. Sausages.

Bail Out. Parachute jump from plane; by extension, to get out of a situation like a date.

Baptized by Fire. To have been under enemy fire for the first time; to have received one’s first wounds.

Bath Tub. Motorcycle sidecar.

Battery Acid. Artificial lemonade powder included in K-rations — considered undrinkable and regularly discarded or used as cleaning solution.

Battle Breakfast. A Navy term referring to the heavy breakfast of steak and eggs commonly given to sailors and Marines on the morning of a combat operation.

I know it’s cliche, but my all-time favorite novel is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. To me it offers prescient warnings on the perils of a consumer society and perfectly captures the American drive to strive for the unattainable, even if it results in tragedy. NPR’s literary critic, Maureen Corrigan, is also a huge Gatsby fan. A far bigger one than I am, in fact! She’s read the book 67 times and has even sat through a seven-hour reading/performance of its text. In her latest book, So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures, Maureen takes us on a cultural/historical tour of a true classic. She wanted to uncover what it is about a novel written about Jazz Age New York that resonates with Americans nearly a century later. In today’s podcast, we discuss what she found in her search. If you’re a fan of the Gatsby, this is a must-listen.

Show Highlights

Why The Great Gatsby was a critical and commercial flop when it was first published and how it became the Great American Novel

Why Gatsby still resonates with readers 90 years after it was published

How Gatsby was a predecessor of the hard-boiled detective novel

The novels that have been published in the past 20 years that are as timeless as Gatsby

What you can do to make Gatsby a more engaging read the next time you dig into it

And much more!

If you’re a fan of The Great Gatsby, So We Read Onis a must-read. The insights Maureen provides made me appreciate Gatsby even more and helped me see a well-worn classic in a new light. I had a hard time putting this book down and as soon as I was finished, I was ready to pick up The Great Gastby and give it yet another read.

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. Welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. One of my all time favorite novels is The Great Gatsby. I know it’s cliché, but every time I’ve read it, and I’ve read it multiple times since high school, I’ve always found some new insights, some new symbolism that I hadn’t seen before, and it’s just a fun, fun read. When The Great Gatsby first came out, it was complete critical and commercial failure, and it wasn’t until after F. Scott Fitzgerald died that it gained the status of the great American novel, and it became required reading for high school English students.

Our guest today wanted to figure out why that was. Why it took so long for The Great Gatsby to become the sort of cultural touchstone in the United States, and why the book still endures today, decades later, a book written about the 1920s prohibition era America, why that story still resonates with us, even in the twenty-first century. Our guest is Maureen Corrigann. She’s a lecturer at Georgetown University. You probably have heard her on NPR’s Fresh Air, where she’s the resident book critic, and her book is called So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be and Why It Endures. In this podcast, we’re discussing all things Gatsby, so let’s do this.

Maureen Corrigann, welcome to the show.

Maureen Corrigan: Thank you, Brett. It’s good to be here.

Brett McKay: Your book is called So We Read On, which is a play on a line from my favorite book, The Great Gatsby. There have been lots of books written about this book, articles, essays dissecting it. What angle are you taking with your book on the Gatsby?

Maureen Corrigan: Yeah. Certainly when I started thinking about writing a book about Gatsby, that was daunting to realize how much has been written about Fitzgerald. He’s probably the most chronicled American writer of all time, and just, also, how much has been written about The Great Gatsby, really daunting. My angle was to approach it as someone who has read the book, by now sixty plus times, who has taught it almost all of my teaching life, so we’re talking like thirty years, and I’ve traveled the country lecturing about it for the Big Read Program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts.

I wanted to talk about it as a passionate informed reader, and to try to figure out where the power of this novel comes from, and not really to talk about it in a scholarly way, although I wanted to use some criticism and some biographical study, but to really talk about it the way I talk about books on Fresh Air, which I do every week, as someone who is really trying to get to the heart of what makes this book work or doesn’t, and why is this book in terms of Gatsby, which disappeared by the time Fitzgerald died in 1940. Why did it come back so quickly, and why has it had this power over us as Americans ever since.

One of the things I talk about is the fact that Gatsby is probably the American novel that unites us if we’ve gone to high school in America. Someone did a survey years ago, and I do an informal survey every year with freshmen English classes at Georgetown where I teach. I say, “What have you read? Have you read To Kill a Mockingbird? Have you read Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick?” Kids raise their hands, but when you say, “Have you read The Great Gatsby,” pretty much everybody in class raises their hand year after year. That’s the one you can count out. That’s our unifying text.

Brett McKay: How did that happen, because you talk about in the book that when The Great Gatsby first came out, it really wasn’t well received by literary critics or the public, so why was it such a flop when it first came out?

Maureen Corrigan: Yeah. It comes out in 1925. Probably the most famous bad review was in the New York World, Joseph Pulitzer’s paper, and the headline read, “Fitzgerald’s latest a dud.” Gatsby was Fitzgerald’s third novel. He had such hopes for it. He thought it was going to outsell This Side of Paradise, his big hit of 1920, The Beautiful and Damned, and then it turns out not even to sell out its second printing. Just to give you a sense of what I’m talking about, when Fitzgerald dies in 1940, remaindered copies of that second printing that Scribner does in 1925, they’re still in Scribner’s warehouse moldering away. It sold about twenty-two thousand copies when it came out in 1925. Fitzgerald never stopped torturing himself, trying to figure out why didn’t it sell, and he had a lot of guesses. He thought, well, it’s too short, and people want more book for their buck. He never liked the title. He thought the title was terrible.

I think most interesting of all, in a letter to Maxwell Perkins, he said, “I didn’t create any favorable female characters, and women drive the fiction market.” I love that letter. I really had a jolt, because that’s what we say today, women drive the fiction market. Men always go for nonfiction.

I, also, think that a lot of critics and book reviewers misread it as just a murder story. I mean it was viewed as a crime novel by a lot of the popular book reviewers. I think they didn’t value it. They said here’s this book about bootleggers, and three violent deaths, and a character whose name even derives from gangster slang from the 1920s. A gat is a gun. I think they just dismissed it as a crime novel.

Brett McKay: I thought that was interesting, because you had a section in your book about this. Before I read your analysis of it, I think most people do see Gatsby as this tragic love story, and tragedy of aspirations that aren’t fulfilled, but you make a case that it could, also, be viewed as one of the first hard boiled noir novels in America.

Maureen Corrigan: Yeah. I think it anticipates so much of what we later see in the great noir movies, like Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce, but, also, you think about Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s working on it from about 1922 through ’25, and he’s, also, for a while living in New York. He moves to New York in 1919, comes back in 1920. Lives there for a few years, and this is the era when the hard boiled detective and crime story is really taking shape in cities like New York, and LA, San Francisco.

Fitzgerald was a great admirer of Dashiell Hammett. All of this reading lists that Fitzgerald always made all of his life. He’d have all of these classics and Greek tragedies on these reading lists that he’d give to friends, and then he’d always have the Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. He was a good friend of H.L. Mencken, the critic, and H.L. Mencken for a while edited the Black Mask Magazine, which carried some of these first noir stories. You think about the fact that we’ve got all these criminal elements in Gatsby, not just Gatsby himself, but folks like Mira Wolfenstein, whose is modeled after Arnold Rothstein, the real life gangster who supposedly fixed the 1919 World Series, the Black Sox scandal.

We’ve got bootlegging, prohibition, all of that atmosphere, loose morals. People are having affairs, and women are smoking and drinking, but it’s, also more than that. It’s the fact that you’ve got this heavy interest of fate in Gatsby. Mixed narration is retrospective. When the book opens, Nick tells us that two years have gone by already, and everybody is dead. Gatsby is dead. Nick is speaking to us present time in 1924, and he’s looking back two years to the summer of 1922. There’s that funny sort of feeling like you get in a noir movie, like Sunset Boulevard, that everything that happens in this story, it’s fixed. It can’t be changed, because you’ve got this voice over, this narration by, in this case, Nick Carraway, who is looking backward and telling us what happens.

Noir is fascinated with fate, and fascinated with the fact that people can’t change their fate. It’s in some ways a very un-American form, and I think it’s really interesting that Fitzgerald choose that kind of framed structure for Gatsby, which basically forecloses all possibilities. I say that Gatsby is our greatest American and un-American novel at once, because it celebrates this aspiration, as you said, this character who tries to be more, who reaches for the stars, but, at the same time, it tells us the game is all fixed. It’s over before it begins, and, in fact, Gatsby is dead as of page two of the novel. We learn that.

Brett McKay: It’s very Greek. It’s like a Greek tragedy almost.

Maureen Corrigan: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Is that the appeal of the book? Is that why Americans are so drawn to it, is that, yeah, you should shoot for your dreams, go for it, even thought it might be impossible? It’s just the striving that counts.

Maureen Corrigan: Yeah. That’s right.

Brett McKay: Is that the draw of the book?

Maureen Corrigan: That’s its deepest draw. That’s what Fitzgerald said the book was about. He writes a letter when he’s living on the Riviera and finishing Gatsby in the summer of 1924. He writes a letter to a Princeton classmate, Ludlow Fowler, who was the best man at his wedding to Zelda in 1920, and he says to Fowler that the novel is about those illusions that give such color to the world that you don’t even care whether they’re true or not. To lose them would be like death. He, also, talks about the fact that the book is about aspirations. Yeah. It’s about dreams. It’s about illusions. It’s about those enabling fictions that make life worthwhile. It’s about striving, even though you know inevitably you’re going to fall short.

I’ve listened to so many speeches I feel like during the Obama presidency, where it’s almost like he’s channeling Gatsby. He’s made so many speeches where he’s talked about this is our almost like inheritance as Americans. That we’re supposed to reach. We’re supposed to strive. We’re supposed to stretch our arms out. Run faster. Try to be better, even though we know inevitably we’re going to die. We’re going to fall short. It’s all going to end. I think that’s what the last line of Gatsby is about. So we beat on boats against the current, drawn back ceaselessly into the past. You want to keep trying to row forward, but you are going to be drawn back ultimately into the past, into the great whatever, nothingness.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about how Gatsby became the great American novel, and the novel that high schoolers read. After Fitzgerald died, there was a renaissance. What caused that re-interest or that rekindling of interest in The Great Gatsby?

Maureen Corrigan: Yeah. It’s funny. Fitzgerald dies at the age of forty-four in Hollywood. He’s working for Paramount. He’s working on different movies, and really treated like a hand in Hollywood, as so many of our great writers were. In fact, he works for two weeks on Gone with the Wind before he’s pulled out of that movie, and he dies in 1940 in December of what’s probably his third heart attack. When he dies, he can’t even find Gatsby in bookstores. When he goes into bookstores in LA …

Brett McKay: That was really sad.

Maureen Corrigan: If I had one wish, sometimes people ask me what would you ask Fitzgerald, and I say I wouldn’t ask him anything. I would tell him, “You did it. You did it. You wrote the great American novel. You did it,” because when he died, he thought he was a failure. His well placed literary friends, people like H.L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, Dorothy Parker, his legendary editor, Maxwell Perkins at Scribner, they work really hard to try to get Fitzgerald’s writing back before the public, so these different editions come out. In fact, Edmund Wilson even completes The Loves of the Last Tycoon, the novel that Fitzgerald is working on in Hollywood when he dies.

What really gives Gatsby a boost is World War II. It’s a story I really didn’t know about until I started researching my book. During World War II, there was this effort by publishers, paper distributors, editors, authors, librarians, to try to get books into the hands of soldiers and sailors overseas, and they come up with this idea for cheap pulp paperback editions of everything from The Odyssey, to Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, to the latest Rex Stout mystery, Moby Dick and Gatsby is chosen as one of the titles to be distributed, made into what are called these Armed Services editions. In fact, I have a mock up of one here, a sample. They looked like this.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I have some of those.

Maureen Corrigan: They were rectangular, because a serviceman’s pocket … You have some originals?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Maureen Corrigan: Oh, my God, that’s great.

Brett McKay: We actually wrote an article about it a couple of years ago. It’s such a fascinating period of history.

Maureen Corrigan: Yeah. It’s so fascinating. Yeah. I mean really anybody who cares about books, you kind of feel like, “Oh, yeah, books can make a difference.” They certainly made a difference to these guys in World War II. Here’s Gatsby. You can’t buy it in 1940, and then by 1945, there are 155,000 editions of The Great Gatsby distributed basically all over the world where American servicemen are. I’ve gotten a couple of letters, which have been amazing, from men who have told me that the first time they encountered Jay Gatsby, that’s how one of these guys opens his letter, when they were serving in 1945. One guy said he was a paratrooper, about to be thrown into occupied France, and that’s when he encountered Gatsby.

After the war ends, then we get the paperback revolution, and Gatsby is one of the titles that’s picked up right away by Bantum, by Scribner’s paperbacks, and in 1949, we get the second Great Gatsby movie, and this one stars Alan Ladd, who was known for playing criminals and tough guys and cowboy loners like Shane, and he plays Jay Gatsby. It’s my favorite Gatsby movie of the ones that exist. It’s not the novel either, but it’s interesting, because it really is Gatsby as a film noir.

Brett McKay: That’s very fascinating. What’s the status of Gatsby today amongst academics, because during the past seventy years or so, it sort of become a darling amongst academics to analyze it in all sorts of ways.

Maureen Corrigan: Yeah.

Brett McKay: What is its status now? Is it still a literary darling, or do academics like it’s kind of low brow?

Maureen Corrigan: It’s got this strange schizophrenic reputation. It’s a great American novel. I don’t think anybody disputes that. I mean a few people dispute it, but they’re idiots. It’s almost like it’s Wonder Bread. It’s not sexy enough. It’s so familiar that I think, again, it’s downgraded a bit. When I would tell colleagues in the English Department at Georgetown that I was working on a book about The Great Gatsby, it was like, “Oh, okay.” It’s like can’t you find anything a little bit more off road to work on.

It’s funny. Somebody posted on Facebook today in honor of July 4th, all of these novelists and critics from other countries around the world giving their suggestions for the great American novel, and for the novels that tell us something about America, and I’ve noticed that the list is interesting. Fitzgerald is on this, number four, but as an American author, but some people have put on the Pat Hobby stories, or they’ve put on This Side of Paradise. It’s almost like people are working to avoid mentioning Gatsby, because it’s like water, it’s like air. It’s so much with us that I think there’s a little bit of a backlash against it in the scholarly world that it’s just too familiar.

Brett McKay: You said you’ve read it sixty times. I’ve lost count the number of times I’ve read it, but what I love about the Gatsby, it’s one of those books, no matter how many items I read it, it still feels fresh, and it doesn’t get stale, and I always pick up some new insight, or catch some new symbolism. What did Fitzgerald do to accomplish that, to make it so fresh, even though you’ve read it sixty times?

Maureen Corrigan: I’m going to give you an answer that’s going to probably put you to sleep and everybody else listening to sleep, but it’s the language. I notice when I say to students, or even on Fresh Air, when I’m trying to speak to a book’s strength, if you say, “It’s got this poetic language,” you can see the ignition key turning off in students’ brains at least, and I feel like I can hear it around the country, because poetic language sounds too highfalutin, but the language is so rich, and it’s funny, and Fitzgerald’s writing like a real poet in Gatsby, and it’s condensed. He said to Maxwell Perkins, his editor in 1922, that his third novel was going to be something different, and I’m quoting mostly from memory. He said I want to write something intricate, and beautiful, and simple, and heavily patterned. He wanted all those things at once. You can read Gatsby like a simple crime story, like a simple love story, but then when you start to reread it, as you’ve done, as I’ve done, and you become alert to those layers of meaning, it’s just such a richer book.

They’ve totaled up the symbols in Gatsby. There are 450 time words in Gatsby, because it’s a novel that’s so aware of an ultimate deadline looming, that Jay Gatsby is going to die by the end of this summer, and that the party is going to be over. It’s a novel that every chapter is organized around a party, starting with that opening dinner party at the Buchanan’s, and ending with the failed party in quotes of Gatsby’s own funeral. He’s got so many layers of symbols, but he’s not hitting you over the head with them. They’re integrated beautifully into the story.

That’s why I think as much as I love James Joyce and I love Dubliners and all of that, I always feel like Joyce, and T.S. Elliot, and those other modernists Fitzgerald met, and admired, and was influenced by, I feel like they’re always nudging me in the ribs, “Hey, here’s another symbol. Look at how clever I am.” Not in Gatsby. He’s got everything in there that every other great modernist writer has, and the fragmented story line, and all of those other modernist tricks, but it’s not like he’s constantly asking us to admire how clever he’s being as a writer. It is a masterpiece, an overused word, but not in this case.

Brett McKay: What I thought was fascinating, one of the things I think made it so great, because he was constantly editing it, and even after the book was published, he was still editing The Great Gatsby.

Maureen Corrigan: I know. It’s crazy. I went to Princeton where Fitzgerald’s papers are, and I looked at his own edition of The Great Gatsby, and this is the first edition that comes out, first printing, and he’s making changes. To an ordinary reader, I can’t have access to what’s going on in his brain, the changes are sort of inexplicable. Like he’s changing the number of the regiment, where supposedly Jay Gatsby served. It’s like why are you doing this, but he’s such a perfectionist, he can’t let it go. I don’t know. I love that about him. It probably shortened his life, but I loved that he couldn’t let it go.

Brett McKay: It’s very like Gatsby, right, the striving. Even if you’re not going to attain perfection, you still got to go for it.

Maureen Corrigan: That’s right. Fitzgerald was raised Catholic, as I was, and sometimes when I’ve read his letters, I feel like I can hear that Catholic influence. Our nuns used to tell us way back when, they used to recite this jingle, “Good, better, best. Never let it rest until your good is better, and your better best.” I feel like Fitzgerald had that planted in his brain, too. You can’t let it go. You’re never good enough.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I’d love to get your thoughts on this, because it’s something that I’ve often wondered since I’ve read the Gatsby, and you are a book reviewer. One of the things I love about Gatsby is that it’s both timeless, but yet, at the same time, it perfectly describes the jazz age New York. It captures the time.

Maureen Corrigan: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Has there been a novel written in the past twenty years that does the same thing as Gatsby, where it’s both timeless, but, also, perfectly captures our time?

Maureen Corrigan: I hate these questions.

Brett McKay: If you don’t have an answer, it’s okay.

Maureen Corrigan: You’re not going to love my answer, but I think a lot of detective fiction does that still.

Brett McKay: Like Lee Child.

Maureen Corrigan: Yeah. Lee Child, Sarah Paretsky. I’ve just read her latest, which is great. I love this new detective fiction writer, A.X. Ahmad, who has an Indian immigrant as his amateur detective, who is a taxi cab driver in New York. It’s a great series. They’re not cute. The latest one is called The Caretaker, and it’s hard boiled. I feel like when detective fiction is well written, as these examples are, they’re, also, linked to their time, because they’re investigating mostly social issues of the time. They have that double identity where they can do that.

I’m trying to think of other people. Most of the writers who are flooding into my brain are people who I think are aiming more for that timeless quality. My favorite novel so far this year is The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro, and that’s a fantasy novel. He’s … from any particular time. It’s hard to do I think.

Long time, 1980s, of course, Tom Wolfe tried to do it with Bonfire of the Vanities. He wanted to write this great Dickensian novel about New York in the go go 80s, but I don’t think that novel has stood the test of time. I think people were reading it in the 80s, and even into the 90s, but it’s really not I don’t think regarded any more as this novel that can stand on its own. Yeah. I’m not coming up with fabulous answers for you.

Brett McKay: No. I love the detective novel thing. That makes sense. I like that a lot. I’m a big fan of detective novels. Last question. For our listeners who are listening, and it’s been a while since they’ve read Gatsby, and they’re listening and they’re like, “Maybe I should give it a second go,” do you have any suggestions on themes or motifs, or something they can do to make reading more interesting or getting more out of it the second time or third time they read it?

Maureen Corrigan: First of all, I would recommend that they watch the Alan Ladd version, because it really foregrounds the crime element and the film noir element. In that way, I think when people have fallen out of love with Gatsby or never got Gatsby in the first place, it’s because it’s been hammered into their heads that this was a great American novel, and they approach it almost too much reverence. I think listening to it is a fabulous idea.

I went to Gatsby twice, the off Broadway production, where the actors had memorized Gatsby, so they did the entire novel in seven and a half hours, and that was when I really heard the humor in it. The first third of Gatsby is filled with jokes, with almost screwball comedy. That opening dinner party, Daisy and Tom, they’re jabbing at each other, like Ricky and Lucy almost. I would try to be alert to the comedy.

The hot reading now of Gatsby is the homo erotic reading, that Nick is in love with Gatsby, and that must be what’s going on. I think maybe if that freshens it up for people to think of that unrequited yearning, everybody in the novel is reaching out for somebody or something that’s out of their reach, so that’s something to pay attention to.

I’m a big fan of looking at the water imagery, which sounds like such an English teacher thing to say, but the novel is terrified of going under, people drowning, people going under. It’s the great American fear that you’re reaching for the stars, but you’re going to be pulled under by your desires, by the past, and certainly by the end of this novel, pretty much everybody is underwater, and there’s a class element to that imagery as well.

Those are some of the things I would maybe recommend doing, but if you can find a good audio version of The Great Gatsby, I think listening to it would be fabulous.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Maureen Corrigan, this has been a fascinating discussion. Thank you so much for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Maureen Corrigan: Thank you. I could talk about Gatsby for hours.

Brett McKay: Me, too. Our guest today was Maureen Corrigan. She’s the author of the book, So We Read On. You can find that on Amazon.com, and if you love the Gatsby, go get that book. You will enjoy the historical backdrop of how the Gatsby came to be, and some of the insights that Maureen provides. If you want to learn more about Maureen’s work, you can find her at NPR.org where you can find more of her book critiques.

That wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at Art of Manliness.com, and if you enjoy this podcast, you get something out of it, I’d really appreciate it if you’d give us a review on iTunes, Stitcher, whatever it is you use to listen to your podcast. I’d really appreciate it, help get the word out. Until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.

Once again we return to our So You Want My Job series, in which we interview men who are employed in desirable jobs and ask them about the reality of their work and for advice on how men can live their dream.

A lot of computer and software-related gigs get lumped into the same bundle of careers, with no real differentiation. The reality, though, is that there are a number of vocations that include programming, development, computer security, etc. Last year, we covered the ins and outs of being an IT professional. Today, we’re looking at the world of app developers. We talked with Jason Butz, who gives us a peek into what he does, and how it’s different from other programming careers.

1. Tell us a little about yourself (Where are you from? How old are you? Describe your job and how long you’ve been at it, etc.).

I was born and grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. I’m 26, but approaching 27 quickly. I’m an Application Developer, which is a fancy way of saying I build web applications. I’ve been with my current employer for almost 2 years, but I have been professionally working on web applications for about 5 years. I’ve been playing with websites and web technology in my free time for more than 15 years.

2. Why did you want to get into application programming/development? Was it something you always knew you wanted to do?

Growing up I wanted to be a vet or a zoo keeper, so this wasn’t exactly what I originally wanted. In middle school I took a summer enrichment class where I learned to build websites. It was still the 90s, and the websites weren’t good looking, but I was hooked. In high school I took every computer class I could and was learning more about web development at home on my own time. I was taking classes on everything from programming to building and fixing computers. I was actually able to get a couple certifications. I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do, but I knew it would deal with computers. Once I started my college search I zeroed in on a Computer Science degree and figured out in college that I was good at web applications and loved building them.

3. Can you define for us what an application developer does? It tends to get lumped in with a variety of other tech careers. What is it that defines your specific role?

With the titles companies use things do get very murky. For example, at the company where I work, an Application Developer can get a promotion to a Software Engineer, where the only real difference is the pay scale available. I had a previous job where I did the same thing, but my title was Developer/Analyst. I am sure there are even more titles used than those, but I don’t know them all. It gets even more complicated when you take into account that the title of Software Engineer is used for jobs that don’t necessarily work with web applications, but just do some sort of programming.

In my case, an Application Developer builds and maintains web applications. In the department I am in we have 3-4 primary internal web applications that we have built and maintain. In another department the Application Developers build custom web applications to extend the product and services that customers have purchased.

For example, one of our internal applications is a project management suite built around our processes and needs. A few of the developers on my team just finished deploying a massive overhaul to our Gantt chart feature. I’m working my way through understanding and building out a complex financial report that needs to be built entirely with information we have in our system. We all work on the same tools, but what we are actually doing can have a great deal of variety.

4. How do you become an application developer? Do you need a college degree? Are there certifications required? If you do go to college, what should you study?

A college degree isn’t necessarily required, but there are a lot of companies that won’t even consider you for a position unless you have one. Without a degree you will need to have a good portfolio of work and projects you have built. If you have made good contributions to popular open source projects, that would be especially helpful (of course, a good portfolio is going to be helpful even with a college degree).

There aren’t too many certifications that I am aware of if you want to do any sort of web development, though I am sure some exist. Certifications can be helpful with any technology job, but employers seem to be getting more leery of potential employees who have a slew of certifications but no real experience to back them up. It isn’t unheard of for people to cram for certification tests and pass but still have no real understanding of the information.

There are several paths you can take for a college degree. I went the Computer Science (CS) route. There are some people on my team who have Information Science (IS) or Computer and Information Science (CIS) degrees. I’ve even worked with one person who had a Computer Graphics degree. CS degrees tend to have more computer theory than IS or CIS. I think I have also seen some colleges offer Web Development degrees, which could even work. It really comes down to what the individual degree program teaches and what exactly you want to do.

5. How do you find work as an application developer? Are there different types of jobs within the field? What’s the job market like?

The best way, which I actually had some trouble with, in finding work as an application developer is to start with an internship. My college didn’t put much emphasis on them, which really worked against me. We had a few interns on my team last summer; one of them did such a good job that he has been all but told he will be hired when he graduates if he applies.

There are also a lot of recruiters for all technical jobs. In Indianapolis there is actually a shortage of technical people, so the recruiters are working really hard. They can be a great way to get interviews and find work, but you have to remember this is their job. They have an interest in getting you hired somewhere, even if it isn’t the best fit for you.

I have had the most luck with referrals from family and friends. I got my first job out of college thanks to a guy I knew who had graduated the year before me. We hadn’t really been friends at the time, but he knew the classes I had been taking and he knew he could vouch for my skills by the simple fact I was getting a degree from the same program he did. While in school I can’t emphasize enough that you need to network with your professors, the alumni, and even people a year or two ahead of you. They could be the key to you finding that dream job. I actually got my foot in the door at my current employer thanks to my half-sibling’s cousin. Sounds kind of crazy and always gets a laugh, but I will take whatever I can get.

There is also the good old method of sending out resumes. I would suggest not using the job finding sites, like CareerBuilder, if you can help it; just send your resume to the company through their own careers section. Look up companies in your area and take a look at what they do and what jobs they have available. If you have a question about whether or not they even have certain types of jobs, don’t hesitate to call them and ask to speak with an HR recruiter. You never know, you may get lucky and get an interview from that. The big thing with sending out resumes is that you are less likely to get a call than someone who has been referred by another employee, so get out there and network.

6. Tell us a little bit about an average work day.

I start my days at 7:30am by choice. The rest of the team doesn’t come in until 9:00. I’m a morning person and more productive in the mornings, so my boss doesn’t mind and I enjoy the quiet. I generally start the day by skimming my email and the helpdesk looking for any issues that I can take care of or need to provide an update on. After that I pick up whatever I was doing the previous day and do my best to focus on that until our SCRUM meeting at 9:30. Our SCRUM meetings are a short meeting where we say what we have been working on and what we plan to do for that day. It’s also the time when our boss might switch up priorities and tell us to do something different if need be. After that I keep going on my work for the day, taking periodic short breaks to walk around and look at something that isn’t code or my current problem.

One thing that is a little unique and different about the team I am currently on is that during lunch we almost always play a game. We tend to play games that we can finish in under an hour, though we are starting to try games that we can easily take a picture of and resume the next day.

After lunch I just keep going on my work until it is time to go home. One thing a little different about my situation is that there is one system that I am the only one who knows how to fully administer or develop on. This isn’t exactly ideal, but training others on it isn’t exactly a priority. So I get a lot of helpdesk tickets for the system and get pulled into meetings whenever people want new features or have questions. All in all the average day isn’t too bad. I work at a technology company and we have an internal instant messaging tool. The whole day the team may not be talking a lot, but we have conversations and jokes constantly flying around in those messages. It makes it easy to socialize while still being productive.

Every month or two we have a release, which makes for a far more stressful and varied couple weeks. Those weeks usually involve testing the entire system and fixing any bugs we find as quickly as possible. Then we release over the weekend and have to release a lot of small fixes the next week as people find more bugs.

7. What is the work/life balance like as a programmer?

It is generally very balanced. Usually you get to show up and leave at regular times, though there are exceptions. If something is critically broken you will generally have to stick around until that is fixed. If you have a feature that needs to be in a release and you are running out of time you’ll have to put in some extra work. If more time is needed to get a release put together and it can’t be pushed back to another day, then you will probably have to put in some more time there. The extent to how much any of these things interrupt your life really depends upon where you work and who your boss is. A lot of times it is possible to know ahead of time that you will have to put in some extra hours and you can plan accordingly.

8. What’s the best part of your career?

The puzzles. Programming things is really like a giant logic puzzle. I have to put different things together to build an application that does something. I may get told that when someone approves an item in the application a certain group of people needs to get an email, but I can’t just put that in as is. I have to take that and break it down to a very basic level. Once I have it broken down I arrange my pieces — the code — so it will accomplish what I want. I also love when you get to create something new. New features that aren’t reports are usually a lot of fun to make. Sometimes complex reports can be interesting too. Having users come to you and say “We need a Gantt chart” and then creating that and handing it to them is a wonderful experience. They tend to look at you like you are some sort of wizard or magician.

Aside from the puzzles and creation the people can be really great. I am a geeky person, but everyone on my team is geeky too. The conversations we’ll have can get insane. Sometimes you hear someone going on about what Marvel is doing with their comic books. Another time you will hear incredibly detailed game reviews. Other times you’ll hear random but fascinating facts about movies. Occasionally things get philosophical. There is never a boring conversation and we all make each other laugh all the time.

9. What’s the worst part?

Boring projects or projects that were once exciting but have turned monotonous. Creating a really basic report that just lists information is not a lot of fun. The only saving grace for them is how quickly you can finish them. You don’t get to do much creation and the biggest puzzle is how you are going to pull all of the right information. The rest of it you have done before. Sometimes big projects can go from really interesting to monotonous and then continue to drag on for weeks. Figuring out how to do everything at the start and having all of these grand ideas is great — it combines some of the best parts of the job. But then you have to do all of those grand things you thought up and it can start to get boring really quick, and then gets frustrating as you forget how you did some things and planned to do others. You have to balance making notes and trying to remember things. The grander your ideas the harder it is to make all of the pieces fit together correctly.

10. What’s the biggest misconception people have about your job?

People think that since I work with computers I know everything about computers, including how to fix them. In my case I do know how to fix computers, but that isn’t as common as people think. Another common one is that since I can write programs, people think I can write a program for anything. I can learn to write programs for other systems, but every platform is a little different. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people tell me, “Hey, I need your help. I have this great idea for a phone app and I need you to make it.” They always look a little dumbfounded when I tell them I’m not familiar with how to make phone apps.

11. Any other advice, tips, commentary, or anecdotes you’d like to add?

If you want to get into any kind of computer programming you will need to know programming languages, but a lot of times it is the ability to learn languages quickly and the right mindset that are more important. You have to take complex problems and break them down to something simpler. Poking holes in ideas and finding logical edge cases is also very useful.

An important lesson I’ve learned, that I feel is pretty useful for everyone, is always own up to your mistakes. At the last company I worked for I was working on the financial system and had pushed out an update that I had written. The next day a manager came over to where the other developer and I sat and told us it looked like $2 million had disappeared from the system. I quickly said that it was probably my fault because I had pushed out some code affecting that the previous day. Admitting that I had messed up went a long way. I was also able to fix the problem and make the money reappear in the financials, which probably didn’t hurt. The other developer there had made $200 million disappear and he hadn’t lost his job either. Always own up to your mistakes and do what it takes to fix them, if they are fixable.

A couple centuries ago, pickpocketing was the scourge of cities around the world. From Dickens’ London to New York City’s famous Five Points, skilled thieves practiced their craft, filching the valuables of passersby without the victim noticing a thing. In fact, that’s how pockets in clothing got their start: Prior to the 17th century, men and women alike carried their valuables in purses outside the body; they then started tying pouches inside their clothes in an attempt to thwart would-be “cutpurses” and thieves. But pickpockets soon adapted and learned how to deftly extract the goods from trouser, waistcoat, and jacket pockets alike.

Around the turn of the 20th century, American prosecutors began cracking down hard on pickpockets, and mandatory schooling took young would-be thieves off the streets. Soon there were few “master” pickpockets left to pass on the trade, and fewer kids willing and able to learn a form of crime that took years to perfect. In more recent years, the decline of cash has made wallets a less desirable target.

While pickpocketing has been on the decline in the U.S for the past fifty years or so, it’s still a major problem in Europe. In fact, pickpocketing has gotten so bad in some countries that popular tourist attractions have had to close for days at a time.

Many police departments shrug off pickpocketing as common petty larceny. But to the victim, having their wallet stolen not only puts them out of the cash they were carrying, but creates a huge cost in time and worry. Credit cards must be canceled and credit agencies must be warned for possible identity fraud. If a passport was lifted, travel plans will likely be delayed and the victim will have to pay for an even more expensive trip home because they missed their original flight.

To avoid finding yourself in that kind of aggravating mess, you simply need to take a few precautions that’ll greatly reduce your vulnerability to pickpockets. And in today’s post we’ll provide expert-backed tips on how to do just that.

Maintain Situational Awareness

The first step in avoiding getting pickpocketed is to always maintain situational awareness when you’re out and about. For an in-depth look at how to develop the situational awareness of Jason Bourne, read this article.

Know Your Thief

It’s hard to pick a thief out of a crowd because pickpockets cross all demographic boundaries and stereotypes. While your grandma may have told you to “Be on the lookout for Gypsies!” pickpockets come in every race and color. While most are male, there are a large number of female pickpockets too. And while pickpocketing has often been called a “boys’ crime,” in Europe it’s common to find pickpocket gangs where the average member is in his 30s.

So don’t assume that you’ll be able to avoid getting pickpocketed by steering clear of certain “types” of people. With that said, keep in mind the following points when you’re out and about in an area known for pickpocketing:

Pickpockets often work in groups. One or two members of the pickpocketing team will act as distractions while an accomplice steals your stuff. So if you see a group of people acting in ways that seem designed to get your attention, be on the lookout for a hand trying to filch your valuables.

Pickpockets are often children. While many pickpockets are grown men, a large number of pickpockets are indeed young boys and girls. Children pickpockets take full advantage of their innocent, doe-eyed looks. Because a tourist doesn’t expect a child to be a criminal, the young pickpocket can get closer to their target without raising suspicion.

You’re likely to encounter more child pickpockets in Europe because in many countries, when a young thief is apprehended by authorities, they’re simply taken to a group home where they walk out the door the next day to do some more stealing.

So don’t be lulled into a false sense of security whenever a child suddenly comes into contact with you in an area known for pickpocketing. It’s possible they’re getting a heist started on you.

Pickpockets are typically well-dressed. When most people imagine a pickpocket, they likely picture a dirty street urchin. The reality is most pickpockets look like well-dressed middle-class folks. They want to blend in with their environment and appear as non-threatening as possible to get as close to you as they can without setting off alarms. So they’ll dress in a way that puts people at ease, which means wearing clean, well-pressed clothing featuring logos of brands that people associate with middle-class wealth (at least in Europe) — Nike, Gap, Adidas, etc.

Know Where Pickpockets Like to Work

While you can encounter pickpockets in any part of a city, some locations are a magnet for pickpockets:

Tourist attractions. Tourist attractions are a pickpocket’s paradise. You’ve got 1) lots of clueless tourists often carrying lots of cash, 2) monuments and exhibits that distract people and take their gaze and attention off their possessions, and 3) high pedestrian traffic where people are bumping into each other and are less likely to notice the touch of a thief’s sticky fingers. Pickpocketing is in fact so rampant at tourist attractions that in recent years both the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre have had to close for several days because of it.

If a popular tourist attraction is on your list of must-sees while traveling, take extra precautions with your valuables when you visit.

Public transportation. Because public transportation forces people to stand right next to each other, it’s a fertile field for pickpocketing. With just a bump from an accomplice, a pickpocket can take your wallet and be off the train and on his way before you even realize it’s missing.

Restaurants and bars. Pickpockets often flock to restaurants and bars that are popular with tourists. Because patrons’ attention is focused on their meal and the people they’re eating with, they often don’t notice the hand that slides into their purse to snatch a wallet.

Hotel lobbies. Hotel lobbies offer a pickpocket a great opportunity to swipe a person’s goods. When tourists arrive at a hotel’s door, they’re often juggling and keeping track of several pieces of luggage. Pickpockets take advantage of the tourist’s diverted attention by stealing what they can from them.

Know the Tricks Pickpockets Use

It’s not just a steady and stealthy hand that makes a successful pickpocket.

Just as magicians use misdirection and distraction to make cards and coins seemingly vanish into thin air, pickpockets use similar techniques to make your wallet and smartphone disappear.

A good pickpocket has a keen understanding of human psychology and understands that people can only direct their attention to one or two things at a time. Consequently, they’ll either wait for or create a moment in which your attention is diverted towards something else to steal from you.

While it’s possible for a lone pickpocket to create the necessary distraction to successfully filch your valuables, it’s much easier when they have a partner in crime. Consequently, as previously mentioned, most pickpockets work in teams.

Below we highlight a few of the tricks that pickpockets commonly use to steal from their victims. Most of them are tactics used by groups, while a few are methods employed by lone thieves:

The helpful stranger. A friendly stranger approaches you to wipe off some lint from your jacket. A few minutes later when you go to retrieve your wallet to buy a drink, you find it missing. Sometimes the ruse is even more elaborate: one person “accidentally” spills something on you, another helps you wipe off the mess, while a third takes advantage of the hoopla by stealing your wallet. If someone acts a little too friendly and helpful towards you, be suspicious. They could be a pickpocket (or the distracter in a pickpocketing team).

Taking advantage of the Good Samaritan. A stranger approaches you asking for help — maybe they have a map and are asking for directions, or they could fall in front of you, dropping everything they have in their hands. The clumsy person is really the distracting half of a pick-pocketing team; while your attention shifts towards helping them, their partner swoops in and stealthily makes off with your wallet.

Creating delays at turnstiles. You’re walking through a crowded turnstile to get on the subway when suddenly the person in front of you stops, causing you to run right into them. Consequently, the person behind you bumps into you as well. The person at the front apologizes and says her ticket didn’t work. She tries again, this time with success. With another apology, she pushes through the turnstile and runs off to catch her train. When you get on your train and sit down, you notice that your wallet isn’t in your back pocket anymore.

The person who caused the delay at the turnstile was the distracter; the person who bumped into you from behind was the pickpocket who lifted your wallet. With all the commotion of bodies bumping into bodies, you never felt a hand slip into your back pocket.

The flash mob. You’re on the subway train when suddenly a huge mass of people surround you and start bumping you. At the next stop, they all get off, and your wallet is missing.

If you’re ever suddenly surrounded by lots of people, get out immediately. You’re about to get pickpocketed.

Charity workers with clipboards. A group of well-dressed, friendly girls approach you with a clipboard. They signal that they’re deaf and mute and point to the clipboard. While you’ve got the clipboard in your hand, reading over the petition/donation form, an accomplice is snatching your wallet or stuff out of your backpack. This is supposedly a popular pickpocket tactic in Paris.

The friendly salesman. While browsing through an outdoor marketplace, you encounter a salesman who’s just a little too friendly and pushy with his wares. He may not actually be interested in making the sale, but simply distracting you while an accomplice steals your wallet.

Fake fights. A group of men starts fighting. You, of course, watch because fights are cool. When the fight’s over, your wallet is gone.

That wasn’t a real fight and you’ve just been suckered.

Child beggars. A group of children suddenly gathers around you talking, shouting, and begging for money. They soon disperse, but you’re lighter in the pants. While many pickpockets look like mild-mannered middle-class folks, some do look like the stereotypical street urchin/beggar.

Bag slashing. Some thieves won’t even bother with all the distractions and stealth tactics, and will just cut open your backpack and take what they can get their hands on. While it’s not that common, it happens enough that you may want to take precautions to prevent it happening to you. We’ll offer some suggestions on how to do that below.

The quick grab before the subway door closes. Another brazen tactic that thieves use is to target individuals who are sitting or standing right next to a subway train’s doors. The thief will stand near the victim on the train or just outside the train’s doors. Right before the doors close, the thief will snatch the purse or backpack or take the wallet, and then bolt out of the train. The victim can’t do much except pound the doors as the train rolls away. Because the thief doesn’t have to worry about you following them, they can afford to be less stealthy with their heist. They’ll just grab whatever they want, not caring if you notice them or not.

Bump and lift. The most common solo pickpocket tactic is the bump and lift. The pickpocket simply bumps into the victim while simultaneously taking the victim’s wallet out of their back pocket.

Pickpocket-Proof Yourself (As Much as You Can)

While it’s impossible to make yourself 100% pickpocket proof, there are some things you can do to make yourself a far less likely victim:

Don’t look like a tourist. Pickpockets love hitting up tourists because 1) they often have lots of cash and valuables on them and 2) they’re typically not paying attention to what’s going on around them because they’re so focused on taking in the new sights.

So avoid looking like a tourist.

This doesn’t mean you have to dress exactly like the locals, but do the best you can to blend in. Don’t wear anything that will make you stand out and broadcast that you’re a tourist with a lot of money. Pickpocketing expert Bob Arno recommends not wearing clothing with high-end brand logos as well as not wearing expensive jewelry or watches. In other words, dress in a culturally appropriate, non-descript way.

Also, avoid gawking at maps and appearing like you don’t know where you are. Before leaving for any destination, have a good idea of how to get there and move like you know where you’re going.

Be alert and assertive. If you’re rushed and encircled by a group of children, there’s a chance they’re working together to steal whatever you have on you. Maintain a confident stance and yell “No!” — they’ll probably back away. If they don’t, don’t be afraid to push your way through even though they’re kids. Likewise, if a “helpful” stranger seems to be suspiciously friendly, don’t be afraid to move away and keep your distance. Thieves count on you being too “nice” to want to be rude or make a scene. You don’t want to come off as aloof and wary to genuinely friendly folks, but you do need to be alert and aware of what’s going on around you.

Keep the bare minimum in your wallet. The less you have in your wallet, the less of a hassle it will be if you do get pickpocketed. Just keep a single credit card, a single form of ID, and a small amount of cash. That’s it.

Keep a back up credit card stowed safely away in your hotel in the event that you do lose your wallet.

Secure your valuables in a front pocket. While a skilled pickpocket can swipe your stuff from your front pocket, it’s more difficult to do than when your stuff is in your back pocket. If you’re looking for a wallet that fits nicely in your front pocket, check out the Rogue Wallet. And don’t forget to put your smartphone in your front pocket as well.

Another more secure place to stash your goods besides your back pocket is the inside pocket of your jacket. For added security, make sure that it can button or zipper close.

Better yet, keep them in a money belt. For maximum security, take a tip from your forebearers and keep your valuables under your clothes, tucked inside a money belt. Keep in mind though that money belts aren’t entirely pick-proof.

Another option that’s even more secure than money belts is underwear with zipper pockets. The Clever Travel Companion is a great example of this type of garment. Even the deftest of pickpockets will have a hard time getting their hands down by your junk to retrieve a wallet without being noticed.

If you see a sign that says “Beware of Pickpockets,” don’t touch your wallet. In areas where petty thieves are prevalent, you’ll often find signs that say “Beware of Pickpockets.” Upon seeing this sign, most people will immediately pat their clothing where they keep their valuables to check that they’re still there. Meanwhile, the pickpockets are standing nearby observing where people are patting themselves so they can go in for the steal!

So if you see a “Beware of Pickpockets” sign, avoid the knee-jerk reaction to check your stuff. You’re just providing a homing beacon to thieves.

Secure your backpack. Backpacks and other bags are a pickpocket’s friend. Not only do they make you look like a tourist (especially the backpacking variety), but because the bags aren’t touching your body, you’re not going to feel it when a pickpocket places his hand inside to steal your possessions.

If you can, avoid carrying a backpack or shoulder bag while out and about. However, if you need to have it on you, take the following precautions to avoid getting pickpocketed:

Don’t keep anything valuable in your backpack. Your wallet and smartphone should be in your front pocket or money belt. Don’t keep these in your backpack. Ideally, you’re only going to keep things in your backpack that you wouldn’t mind losing.

Don’t put anything in the back pocket. The easiest target on your backpack is the back pocket on the outside. A pickpocket can easily unzip it and get stuff out without you feeling it.

Put locks on your zippers. If you do need to keep valuables in your backpack (for example, a camera), lock the zippers with small luggage locks.

Wear the hip belt when you’re walking. Besides making the bag more comfortable, the hip belt can also serve as an added security device. More brazen thieves will simply just take your backpack off your shoulders and run off with it. If you’ve got that hip belt secured, such a grab becomes a far more difficult, two-step process.

Keep bags in front of you when on public transit. When you’re on public transit, move your backpack from your back to your front. That way you have a better view of sneaky guys trying to get their hands into your stuff.

Keep bags between your feet while eating. Don’t place your bag by your chair, or hang it on a chair while you’re dining. Always keep your bags in physical contact with you.

Buy slash-proof bags. While not entirely knife-proof, slash resistant bags can make slash and grab jobs a bit more difficult for crooks. It might be worth it to consider the investment.

Never put your phone on the table when you’re eating. I’ve never understood why people put their smartphone on the table while eating; it’s rude and prevents you from being fully present with the folks you’re dining with. But if you’re one of those people who absolutely must keep their phone on the table while you’re at a restaurant, be aware that pickpockets are targeting you. A growing number of enterprising pickpockets are casing restaurants with outdoor eating areas and looking for phones sitting on tables. When they see one, they’ll swoop in as a team — one guy acting as the distraction (selling flowers, newspapers, candy, etc.), while his accomplice grabs the phone.

Also keep your phone locked and install software that allows you to remotely wipe clean its data. If your phone does get stolen, you don’t want the pickpocket to have access to your valuable information.

What to Do If You Do Get Pickpocketed

There’s no such thing as perfect security. Even if you follow the above guidelines, there’s a chance you’ll still get pickpocketed. So what do you if it happens to you?

Make a copy of your ID before you leave. Before you leave for your trip, make a copy of your passport and driver’s license. I’d recommend storing these in Dropbox or Google Drive. These will come in handy in the event you lose your passport and ID and need to get a new passport from the embassy so you can make your trip home.

Call your credit card company. In addition to the copies of your passport and IDs, have the last four digits of the credit card you’re carrying with you on your trip stored somewhere. Along with that, have the phone number of the company that issued your card. If your wallet goes missing or stolen, immediately call the issuing company and let them know. Any attempted transactions with your card will then be blocked from clearing.

Call a credit reporting agency. After you’ve called your credit card company, call one of the main credit reporting companies, like Equifax or Experian, to report your card as missing or stolen. The reporting company will place an initial fraud alert on your credit file for 90 days. This will put companies issuing credit (banks, credit card companies, etc.) on alert that you might be the victim of identity fraud, and it will make opening new accounts in your name more difficult.

File a report with the police. If you believe you’ve been the victim of theft, file a report with the local police. It might not do much to get your ID and credit cards back, but it won’t hurt.

If you’re trying to make a good first impression with your place, know that nothing says sterile and boring like blank walls. A few pieces of manly art or virile photos hung and displayed tastefully will liven things up and give you a chance to show some of that stellar personality of yours. And even if you don’t much care for wall art yourself, your significant other likely does; being asked to hang something up may be perhaps the world’s most common “honey-do.” Can you, ahem, nail this task?

While not necessarily an exact science, knowing some basics about wall hangings, and where to place prints on the wall, will ensure that your home has charm that will knock the socks off visiting dates and parents, and greatly please your main squeeze.

All of this is much easier with two people, so grab your best gal or pal, and get to it!

Choose Your Method

Before hanging a picture, you have to choose how you’re going to hang it. This is predicated mainly on three things: size/weight of the picture, the hanging options present on the picture (i.e. wire, ring, sawtooth hanger, etc.), and wall material.

For most prints and most walls, standard nails or picture hanging hooks work just fine. Many experts recommend using anchors when putting any print on drywall with no stud, but honestly, I’ve hung tons of pictures with just nails, and I’ve never had an issue. Another newer option is the Monkey Hook; no tools needed, you just push it into the wall and the large hook sits on the back of the drywall, securing it in place. I’ve not personally used these, but have heard excellent reviews.

For small prints, one nail/hook will often do the trick; for medium-sized prints you might be able to get away with just one, but using two nails/hooks will be more secure and more likely to stay centered

For large prints or especially heavy frames, this is when you’ll want to use some kind of anchor if going into drywall with no stud. There are two primary types: plastic wall plugs and heavy-duty toggle bolts. Toggle bolts certainly carry the most load capacity, but also do the most damage to your wall, as you need to drill a good-sized hole first. If the placement of your heavy print lines up with a stud (the 2x4s in the wall, found with a stud finder), a heavy-duty nail often does the trick.

For canvas prints, and other very lightweight prints, you can even use 3M poster hangers that utilize either plastic hooks or velcro strips, and come with the benefit of not marring your walls. I also use these when hanging images on brick walls — much easier than drilling into it.

Picking the Perfect Placement

Choosing where exactly to hang your picture is one of the most commonly flubbed parts of this task. You first need to decide on which wall or space your image is going to be hung. In that space you’ll want to measure across to find the center, and mark it with pencil or painter’s tape.

You then need to decide how high the print will be on the wall, which is where many people go wrong. As a general rule, the middle of the print should be at about eye level. Obviously everyone’s eye level is different, so for the sake of ease, most experts call that 60-65 inches. Mark this as well, and when matched up with your horizontal halfway point, you’ll know right where the center of your print should be.

If You’re Doing a Gallery Wall

The gallery wall in our little boy’s nursery. You’ll notice that for the most part, we spaced the frames out evenly from each other. There are some exceptions where a certain frame didn’t cooperate, but this method allows for creativity in crafting the ultimate shape of your gallery. While not centered horizontally on the wall, the middle line vertically is right at eye level.

The nice thing about a gallery wall is that it offers a little more room for creativity; the hard part is that you’re tasked with precisely hanging multiple prints so that it looks pulled together. Experts recommend treating the entire gallery as a single print when deciding on wall placement. This is more true for height than for width; while you do want the middle of your “unit” to be about eye-level, galleries don’t necessarily have to be centered horizontally if you’re going for some creative flair.

Galleries (or any arrangement of multiple prints, for that matter) don’t have to form a perfect shape, but it’s a good rule of thumb to keep prints evenly spaced from each other. They don’t have to be, but for most guys, it’s an easy guideline to follow. Most of the prints shown above are evenly spaced on all sides, but there are a couple exceptions where a particular frame wouldn’t cooperate. Just do the best you can, and take advantage of a lady’s touch if possible — they have a better eye for these things, or at least care more about the final result!

To make life easier, cut out pieces of paper that exactly match all your frames. Using painter’s tape, lay out your entire gallery on the wall before placing any holes. Then simply move from one piece of paper to the next, replacing it with the real thing, roughly using the steps outlined below. It’s admittedly tough to do, but the effect is worth it.

Hanging the Picture

Now that you have the perfect spot picked out, you first need to do some more measuring and also some taping.

There are numerous methods to measuring and marking where your print will go — each with their pros and cons. I’ve found using painter’s tape, specifically to mark the top edge, to be the best combo of quick/easy and exact.

First, have your handy dandy helper hold the picture up to where you’ve decided it will be — that is, place the center over the mark you made when deciding on placement. Then put painter’s tape along the top edge, making sure to go the entire length of the frame and a little bit beyond. Once placed, put pencil marks on the tape to note the edges of the frame.

From there, measure and mark where your nails/hooks will go along the horizontal plane. If using one nail, measure the width of the frame and split the difference. Above, my frame is a lightweight two-foot-long canvas, so I’m placing a mark at one foot. If using two nails, divide the length into thirds.

Once you’ve marked that, you’ll then need to measure down, on the print itself, from the top of the frame to where the nail/hook will be. If the print has a wire, pull it taut; if it has d-rings or sawtooth hangers, measure to where the nail will sit. On my canvas here, it came to 1.5″.

Next, it’s as simple as measuring that same distance down from the halfway mark in your tape, and hammering a nail or drilling for an anchor. Once the print is hung, use a level (either analog or on your phone — there are tons of great apps!) to ensure its evenness. Then you can enjoy a beautifully hung print!

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Humans are social beings. For most of history, we lived together in small tribes made up of extended families. Within the tribe, a boy had parents, relatives, and elders of all kinds who shepherded him into adulthood. Through rites of passage, he learned what his community expected from him as a man, and he gradually began to take on those responsibilities and their attendant privileges.

Today we live a far more atomized and isolated lifestyle. Extended family no longer lives near each other for the most part, and parents typically don’t stay in an area (or even neighborhood) long enough to establish roots and deep-seated friendships. It’s every man, and boy, for himself, and young men often don’t get much guidance on how to grow into mature manhood.

In The Wonder of Boys, Dr. Michael Gurian argues that boys can avoid these pitfalls if adults are willing to step up and take a more proactive role in creating a supportive tribe for them. This tribe is ideally composed of three different “families” that together raise a boy into mature, well-adjusted manhood. It should be noted that girls absolutely benefit from being enmeshed in these three families, too. Gurian would just argue that because of the general tendency for boys (thanks to testosterone) to disengage and be drawn to potentially destructive pursuits, boys and young men have more to lose if they don’t receive this kind of support (see: the gender make-up of mass shooters, the prison population, the suicide rate, the college graduation rate, etc.). Though you shouldn’t think of the three families as a way to prevent your son from becoming a dropout or criminal either; even if he’s a good kid, growing up within a tribe will help him become his best possible self.

Today we’ll take a look at who makes up each of the three families, and offer some ideas to parents, extended family members, and young men themselves on how to build, strengthen, and make the most of them.

The 3 Families Every Young Man Needs

First Family

A boy’s First Family is his nuclear family. The First Family consists of birth or adoptive parents or even grandparents who have taken on the role of raising kids full-time.

A boy spends most of his time with his First Family, and it thus serves as the foundation for his development. Within the home, a child is taught the values of his tribe on a continual, everyday basis. Ideally, it is here he learns how to cooperate with others, to love and be loved, and the importance of contributing to the household economy (through chores or otherwise) and the well-being of his family. What’s more, it is within the First Family that a child receives an education in the skills necessary to survive and thrive on his own.

Study after study has shown that children who are raised in a home where both a mother and father are present fare better than children raised by single parents. They do better in school, they’re less likely to do drugs, they’re less likely to become teenage parents, and they’re more likely to go to college. What’s more, children raised by both parents in the home are healthier physically and emotionally than those raised by single parents. And all of these benefits are particularly pronounced for boys.

This isn’t to say that if you’re raising your kiddo as a single parent, that he’s doomed to a drug-filled life of juvenile delinquency. As we’ll see below, the support of the other two families can help fill gaps that are lacking in your First Family. But the two-parent home is the ideal and a worthy aim for all. If it doesn’t work out after we’ve given it everything, then we can adjust and work with the situation we have.

How to Help Give Young Men a Stronger First Family

Advice for Fathers in Intact Families

Always work on your marriage. The relationship between you and your wife forms the foundation for your family; as the saying goes: “the best way to love your children is to love their mother.” Kids can sense when things aren’t right between mom and dad, and it adversely affects them, sapping their sense of security and depriving them of a good example of marriage. The way you and your wife live out your relationship will shape the way your kids will live out theirs. Make sure you’re modeling a positive partnership. Be sure to check out our marriage category for inspiration and skills to keep your marriage on the right track.

Create a positive family culture. You’ve probably met those families that seem to have it all together. The parents were happy. The kids were all well-adjusted and did the right thing. Everyone in the family seemed to genuinely love, respect, and care for each other. These sorts of families don’t just happen — the parents were extremely intentional about creating and fostering a positive family culture. As the father, take the lead in guiding and directing yours. The tips below offer direction on just how to do that.

Work with your family on developing a mission. What principles do you want your kids to learn in your home? What’s the purpose of your family? You may feel that family members know these things implicitly, but it’s vitally important to make them explicit.

Have regular family meetings. While a family mission statement can provide the big-picture vision for your family, regular family meetings are how you take that vision and turn it into action. It’s where the rubber meets the road. During weekly family meetings, you ensure that everyone’s calendars are synced and solve problems that the family may be experiencing. More importantly, it’s a chance to reinforce your family’s culture and values with planned lessons and discussion.

Establish family traditions.Family traditions help strengthen the family bond, teach important values, and provide a much-needed source of identity for your children. If you haven’t yet, start instituting memorable, bond-building traditions into your family life. Need ideas? Check out this list of 60+.

Family meals. There’s nothing magical about gathering the family for regular meals; it’s what you do with them that matters. Use mealtimes (it doesn’t have to be dinner) as a chance for your family to slow down, get together face-to-face, talk without distractions, cement your values, create a feeling of support, and build loving bonds.

Advice for Fathers in Divorced Families

Do what you can to work with the other parent in raising your son. Some research shows that it isn’t the divorce itself that causes much of its ill effect on children, but the conflict and bickering that continues to go on between their parents after the split. So prioritize civilly working with the mother of your children to raise them. I know that in many cases this is easier said than done — but do what you can. Strive to play an active role in your child’s life.

If you’re a mother who’s divorced from your children’s father, make their spending time with dad a top priority. You’re helping your kids be the best they can be.

There are a lot of resources out there for respectful collaborative parenting between divorced parents; I recently heard an interview with the author of this book on the subject, and it seems like a good one.

Respect step-parents, but still acknowledge your role as your son’s father. In divorced families, new spouses — and therefore step-parents — often enter the picture. This can lead to anger, jealousy, and competitiveness. Just as your kids will pick up on tension between you and their mom, they’ll pick up on it between you and a new spouse as well. These are admittedly tough situations, but be sure you respect the step-parent, especially when talking about them in front of your kids. Acknowledge that the new man has a role to play in raising them, but also assert yourself as the father as much as you can. You can still establish important and memorable traditions and rites of passage — even if that means only on a bi-weekly or monthly basis.

Advice for Young Men

Prioritize spending time with your family and do your part to encourage a positive family culture. As you enter adolescence, you’re naturally going to want to pull away from your parents and siblings some. That’s a healthy part of becoming an independent adult. But continue to make time for your First Family as well. Ungrudgingly attend your family meetings (and if your parents have fallen down on the job, encourage everyone to do it!); try not to skip out on family dinners to hang out with friends or do other activities; spend time with your brothers and sisters. Encouraging a positive family culture is something not just for your parents to do; you have a big role to play as well.

Be on the lookout for positive First Family traits you admire. Nobody comes from a perfect family, and by the time you’re ready to head off on your own, you’ll probably have some idea of how you might want to live differently than you were raised. In your high school and early college years, take note of what you admire about your friends’ parents and the family cultures they’ve created. Depending on how your own family life was, you might take a lot from other families, or you might just take small bits and pieces. Either way, thinking intentionally about what you want your future to look like and observing the families around you will be a boon to your maturity and family.

Second Family

While a young man’s First Family should offer a solid foundation for his development, it isn’t enough. As mentioned at the start, for most of human history nuclear families were deeply enmeshed within a community that included close relatives and friends who lived nearby. A boy wasn’t just raised by his mom and dad, but his grandparents, aunts and uncles, and friends of the family as well.

Gurian calls this close group of intimates the Second Family. The Second Family reinforces the values and skills taught within the home, and also helps give young men a sense of identity and belonging. This extended family is doubly important for boys raised in single parent households.

Due to cultural and sociological changes in the 20th century, today’s children don’t have the kind of regular contact with grandparents or extended family that was common in centuries past. Increasing mobility has also prevented parents from forming close friendships with other adults who can act as godparents or non-blood uncles and aunts to their children. Consequently, children miss out on the nurturing and insights these individuals can provide, and parents are left carrying the entire burden of raising their children alone.

Author Kurt Vonnegut astutely noted that this lack of supporting relatives and close friends is likely a contributor to marriages and families coming apart:

“Until recent times, human beings usually had a permanent community of relatives. They had dozens of homes to go to. So when a married couple had a fight, one or the other could go to a house three doors down and stay with a close relative until he or she was feeling tender again. Or if the kids got so fed up with their parents that they couldn’t stand it, they could march over to their uncle’s for a while. Now this is rarely possible. Each family is locked into its little box. The neighbors aren’t relatives. There aren’t other houses where people can go and be cared for. When we ponder “what’s happening to America—” “Where have all the values gone?” and all that—the answer is perfectly simple. We’re lonesome. We don’t have enough friends or relatives any more. And we would if we lived in real communities.”

Raising a human being is a tough job. And it wasn’t meant to be done alone or even with just two people. It’s become cliché by now, but it really does take a village to raise a child.

How to Help Give Young Men a Stronger Second Family

Advice for Fathers

Stay near your parents and your relatives. When Kate and I were newly married and without kids, we were pretty set on leaving Oklahoma and settling down in Vermont. We loved the Green Mountain State and all the opportunities for outdoor adventure it provided. But when we had our first child we quickly decided that keeping our roots in Oklahoma would be the best thing for him and us.

Gus and Scout love hanging out with Kate’s parents, who actually live just down the street from us. And I love that my kids get to see their grandparents on a regular basis. Nana and Jaju (phonetic Polish for grandfather) have more time and patience for doing crafts, games, and projects with the kids, and Gus and Scout are learning things from them they might not otherwise learn with us. My wife’s sister and her family also live close by, allowing our kids to get to hang out with their cousin several times a week. On Sundays, we all get together at my in-laws’ house for a big dinner. We eat, tell stories, get in some generally good-natured arguments, and then Jaju takes the kids upstairs to do some gymnastics on a ramp built from couch cushions.

Plus, my parents and brother live just 90 miles from us in Oklahoma City. They often come up here and we make regular trips down there to see them. My folks of course love seeing the kids, and Gus and Scout find the trips a real treat.

It makes Kate and me really happy that our kids can see their relatives regularly, and it seems incredibly enriching for them.

Now I know economic necessity might not make staying near your family a possibility. Sometimes you’ll have to take a job halfway across the country in order to support your family. I also understand that maybe the reason you keep away from your parents and siblings is because their influence is toxic rather than positive. But do what you can to stay near your parents when it’s a viable option, and consider making it a priority as you plan your life. You’ll be amazed at how much it benefits you, your children, and even your marriage (easier date nights and child-free vacations!).

If you don’t/can’t live near relatives, be intentional about creating opportunities for them to connect. If you’re already at a point in life where you have kids are separated from family, do your best to communicate regularly via email, phone, and Skype/FaceTime. Invite family to come stay with you, spend the time/money to visit them, plan vacations together — you get the idea. Your ability to do all this obviously depends on your unique means and circumstances, but even if you don’t personally love visits from your parents or the in-laws, your kids surely will, and they’ll benefit greatly from it.

Find mentors for your sons. In addition to relatives, you’ll also want close non-blood friends to be a part of your son’s Second Family. Maybe you have a best bud who still lives near you that can fill that role. If you don’t, look for people in your neighborhood, church, or even workplace. Growing up, I had several adults who served as close mentors to me, most of whom were men from my church who were involved with the youth program. One of them was an older man named Andrew Lester. He was an artist and sculptor who I visited each week to help with chores around the house and in his studio. During that time, he’d share stories from his life and ask me about what was going on in mine. Another mentor from church lived down the street from me. Together we’d go visit families in our congregation once a month to see how they were doing and provide service for them. I learned a lot about servant leadership from watching his example.

Look in your network to see if you can find any adults who could be a part of your son’s Second Family. Don’t foist the mentorship on your friend or the mentor on your son — he’ll just resent it. The relationship needs to grow naturally. My friendship with Andrew began when I was asked by my church to go help him pave his walkway with some new bricks. From there, he asked me to come over every other week or so to help him move busts around in his studio. Over time, we became friends. Find a way to introduce your son to these non-kin Second Family members in a like manner.

Know who your son’s friends are (and treat them like family). Though Gurian’s definition of the Second Family includes only the parent’s relatives and friends, I think a boy’s own friends should be included as well. During adolescence, a young man’s friends can have much more influence on him than his kin.

So as a father, get to know who your son’s friends are, and treat them like your own. Make your home a place where he and his buddies will want to hang out. I was always grateful that I had other “families” to hang out with when I was growing up. And it was always nice to see that my friends were able to cut it up with my folks and feel right at home with my family.

What do you do when your son befriends kids who probably aren’t a good influence on him? That’s definitely a tough one, and something I have yet to experience. The experts say you don’t want to outright forbid friendships because that can spark a “Romeo-and-Juliet effect” in which you just increase the allure of the friendship by making it forbidden. Instead, let your kid hang out with who he wants, but set limits — like he can only hang out with them at your house or something like that. Of course, you can’t know what your son is doing and who he’s seeing all the time. Sometimes you just have to keep reinforcing your family’s values and let him make his own choices.

Become friends with parents of your son’s friends. Another source of non-kin members of your son’s Second Family are the parents of your son’s friends. Your son will likely be spending time at his friends’ houses, so he’ll be spending time with his friends’ parents. Get to know those parents. It doesn’t mean you need to be best chums, but you should at least know who they are and have an idea of their values and parenting system. When appropriate, work together in helping raise each other’s kids.

Growing up, I was a fortunate enough to live on a street with four families that had boys the same age as me. We were in and out of each other’s homes all the time, and the moms and dads became the moms and dads of all the boys on the street.

As I got older and made friends with other kids outside of my neighborhood, my parents somehow connected with the parents of my friends. My mom simply reached out to other moms, talked about their crazy boys and craft fairs, and a friendship developed between them. It seemed like each pair of parents gave the others tacit permission to set their respective son straight if they caught them doing something dumb. You begrudge it as a teenager, but you’re grateful for it when you’re a grown man.

Advice for Relatives

If you’re a grandfather, stay connected with your grandkids. If you don’t live within driving distance of your grandchildren, do your best to stay connected with them. Email or write them a letter once a month. Share stories with them from your childhood. Ask about what’s going on in their life. Skype often. When possible, get out to see them in person. Don’t underestimate the positive influence you can have on your grandkids.

If you’re an uncle, be the best uncle you possibly can be. Uncles have a unique and important role to play in families. They’re older than their nieces and nephews, and so can be positive male mentors. But they’re younger than Gramps, and can be up for goofy fun. They also provide nieces and nephews a look at life through the eyes of someone who branched off the same family tree, but may have a very different lifestyle than their parents. Whether he was married or single, most of us can remember that cool uncle in our lives that we looked up to. As you get older, and your siblings have kids, it’s time to become that cool uncle yourself. It doesn’t take much: be involved in their lives, babysit, write them a letter, visit when you’re in town, learn the tricks of the trade, etc. For more tips on being an awesome uncle, check out our definitive guide.

Sign up to be a mentor. Many boys and young men don’t have anyone who can be a part of their Second Family for whatever reason. But you can fill that role by signing up to be a mentor. Big Brothers is always looking for new male mentors. You can even check with your church to see if there’s a young man in need of a mentor. Just make sure you’re ready for the commitment. This isn’t some nice thing you do whenever it’s convenient for you. You’re there to fill an almost family-like role for that boy, and you need to be prepared for the work that it’ll take.

Advice for Young Men

Choose your friends wisely. In looking at folks I knew from high school, I’m struck by the way in which the friends they chose greatly altered their path in life — for better and for worse. And I’ve seen multiple families in which one of the children turns out great, and the other goes off the deep end — with one of the only differences between the siblings being the kind of people they hung out with in high school. The influence of your friends on your life cannot be overestimated.

Unhappy and uncomfortable with the group of buddies you have now and want to make better-caliber friends? Join activities that tend to attract disciplined, smart, straight-arrow kids like student council and the cross-country team.

Third Family

The Third Family consists of organizations (like your child’s school), the larger community, the media, and your son’s peers.

This is the family a father has the least personal control over; you can’t usually choose your child’s teacher, classmates, etc. So you may teach your child one thing within the home, but they’ll hear something completely different from the wider culture. For this reason, Dr. Gurian notes, often “the values of this Third Family run counter to the values of the boy’s first family — our values.”

While you have less influence on the Third Family, it doesn’t mean you can’t have any influence on it.

It will take initiative on your part to ensure that the values and culture you’re trying to inculcate within your home are reinforced by your son’s Third Family. When it’s not possible to influence this outer ring of social ties, you’ll simply need to be more intentional about bolstering your own family’s culture.

How to Help Give Young Men a Stronger Third Family

Advice for Fathers

Get involved in your children’s school. Don’t just treat you son’s school as a babysitter. They’ll be spending most of their childhood and teenage years within the walls of a classroom — you should want to know what they’re learning and doing there. Go to PTA meetings and voice your concerns. But don’t just carp. Show your good faith by volunteering to help with projects and events within the school. Many schools now have “Fantastic Father Fridays” or something like that for dads to come to the classroom, eat donuts with the kids, and talk to the teachers. The job of educating your child isn’t just the school’s job. Parents have a role to play too.

Consider private school or home schooling. If you’re not happy with how your local public schools are going about educating your children, do something about it. For example, consider a private school. Most private schools offer scholarships that make it affordable for average families.

If private school isn’t economically feasible, you might consider homeschooling. I’ve run into more and more parents — both liberal and conservative — who are starting to homeschool their children because they’re not happy with the bureaucracy of public schools.

Be warned, of course, that home schooling is a huge time and energy commitment for parents. Getting your kids to do their chores is hard enough. Coming up with lesson plans and making sure your kids do their assignments is even harder. Luckily, the internet has made it far easier to access curriculum resources and to connect with other families to create a homeschooling co-op.

Get the Second Family involved in school. Don’t just make school a thing for the nuclear family. Get grandma and grandpa involved as well as extended family. Invite them to plays and recitals, and share what the kids are doing in the classroom. That way when the kids are spending time with their Second Family, they can reinforce the things the child is learning in school.

Encourage your son to join a sports team. A sports team can play an important role in your child’s Third Family. Research shows that children who play team sports grow up to have better people and leadership skills than adults who didn’t play team sports as children. Athletics are where children can learn firsthand the values of cooperation, friendly competition, losing with dignity, fair play, and hard work. You might even consider coaching a team yourself!

Get involved in your church or community organization. Churches and community organizations are great places to build and strengthen a Third Family. They reinforce the values and principles you teach within your home, and can also be the source of Second Family mentors.

Be intentional about the media that you and your family consume. We don’t have any control over the content the media creates, but we can control the content that comes into our homes. Limiting screen time for your kids is a good place to start — encourage them to actually do stuff.

When the kids are in front of the TV or on the iPad, make sure they only see things that are appropriate for their age and aligned with your family’s values. Use internet filters and parental controls, but more importantly, talk to your kids about what they’re watching and explain how it can shape who they are.

Advice for Young Men

Carefully consider what you consume. Having your parents control your media is a drag, and you and I both know it’s not possible for them to filter out everything. Now’s the time to take charge of your own media consumption habits, and be proactive about what you want to take in.

While it may seem cheesy or old fashioned to believe that what you watch and listen to will affect you, it’s just a psychological reality that what gets into your head influences your thoughts, and your thoughts influence everything about who you are. Carefully curating your media consumption isn’t just about stuff like avoiding porn either; take it from a guy like Thoreau, even letting the time-consuming trivialities of clickbait media lumber your mind will sap its ability to contemplate the true wonder and beauty of the world.

Conclusion

It really does take a village to raise a child. Proactively building and strengthening these three families will provide your son with the love, support, guidance, and examples he needs to develop into his best self and mature into an honorable manhood. If one of these families will always be a weak plank in your lives for reasons you can’t control, work on strengthening the other two even more. The big takeaway from the article should be this: The more you surround your kids — sons and daughters alike — in a community of loving bonds where they are known, recognized, cared for, admonished, and encouraged, the better chances they’ll have of becoming happy, well-adjusted adults.

“The Supreme Charity of the World”From The Kingship of Self-Control, 1901 By William George Jordan

True charity is not typified by an almsbox. The benevolence of a check book does not meet all the wants of humanity. Giving food, clothing and money to the poor is only the beginning, the kindergarten class, of real charity. Charity has higher, purer forms of manifestation. Charity is but an instinctive reaching out for justice in life. Charity seeks to smooth down the rough places of living, to bridge the chasms of human sin and folly, to feed the heart-hungry, to give strength to the struggling, to be tender with human weakness, and greatest of all, it means—obeying the Divine injunction: “Judge not.”

The true symbol of the greatest charity is the scales of judgment held on high, suspended from the hand of Justice. So perfectly are they poised that they are never at rest; they dare not stop for a moment to pronounce final judgment; each second adds its grain of evidence to either side of the balance. With this ideal before him, man, conscious of his own weakness and frailty, dare not arrogate to himself the Divine prerogative of pronouncing severe or final judgment on any individual. He will seek to train mind and heart to greater keenness, purity, and delicacy in watching the trembling movement of the balance in which he weighs the characters and reputations of those around him.

It is a great pity in life that all the greatest words are most degraded. We hear people say: “I do so love to study character, in the cars and on the street.” They are not studying character; they are merely observing characteristics. The study of character is not a puzzle that a man may work out over night. Character is most subtle, elusive, changing and contradictory—a strange mingling of habits, hopes, tendencies, ideals, motives, weaknesses, traditions and memories—manifest in a thousand different phases.

There is but one quality necessary for the perfect understanding of character, one quality that, if man have it, he may dare to judge—that is, omniscience. Most people study character as a proofreader pores over a great poem: his ears are dulled to the majesty and music of the lines, his eyes are darkened to the magic imagination of the genius of the author; that proofreader is busy watching for an inverted comma, a mis-spacing, or a wrong-font letter. He has an eye trained for the imperfections, the weaknesses. Men who pride themselves on being shrewd in discovering the weak points, the vanity, dishonesty, immorality, intrigue and pettiness of others, think they understand character. They know only part of character–they know only the depths to which some men may sink; they know not the heights to which some men may rise. An optimist is a man who has succeeded in associating with humanity for some time without becoming a cynic.

We never see the target a man aims at in life; we see only the target he hits. We judge from results, and we imagine an infinity of motives that we say must have been in his mind. No man since the creation has been able to live a life so pure and noble as to exempt him from the misjudgment of those around him. It is impossible to get aught but a distorted image from a convex or a concave mirror.

If misfortune comes to someone, people are prone to say, “It is a judgment upon him.” How do they know? Have they been eavesdropping at the door of Paradise? When sorrow and failure come to us, we regard them as misdirected packages that should be delivered elsewhere. We do too much watching of our neighbor’s garden, too little weeding in our own.

Bottles have been picked up at sea thousands of miles from the point where they have been cast into the waters. They have been the sport of wind and weather; carried along by ocean currents, they have reached a destination undreamed of. Our flippant, careless words of judgment of the character of someone, words lightly and perhaps innocently spoken, may be carried by unknown currents and bring sorrow, misery and shame to the innocent. A cruel smile, a shrug of the shoulders or a cleverly eloquent silence may ruin in a moment the reputation a man or woman has been building for years. It is as a single motion of the hand may destroy the delicate geometry of a spider’s web, spun from its own body and life, though all the united efforts of the universe could not put it back as it was.

We do not need to judge nearly so much as we think we do. This is the age of snap judgments. The habit is greatly intensified by the sensational press. Twenty-four hours after a great murder there is difficulty in getting enough men who have not already formulated a judgment, to try the case. These men, in most instances, have read and accepted the garbled, highly colored newspaper account; they have to their own satisfaction discovered the murderer, practically tried him and—sentenced him. We hear readers state their decisions with all the force and absoluteness of one who has had the whole Book of Life made luminant and spread out before him. If there be one place in life where the attitude of the agnostic is beautiful, it is in this matter of judging others. It is the courage to say: “I don’t know. I am waiting further evidence. I must hear both sides of the question. Till then I suspend all judgment.” It is this suspended judgment that is the supreme form of charity.

It is strange that in life we recognize the right of every criminal to have a fair, open trial, yet we condemn unheard the dear friends around us on mere circumstantial evidence. We rely on the mere evidence of our senses, trust it implicitly, and permit it to sweep away like a mighty tide the faith that has been ours for years. We see all life grow dark, hope sink before our eyes, and the golden treasures of memory turn to cruel thoughts of loss to sting us with maddening pain. Our hasty judgment, that a few moments of explanation would remove, has estranged the friend of our life. If we be thus unjust to those we hold dear, what must be the cruel injustice of our judgment of others?

We know nothing of the trials, sorrows and temptations of those around us, of pillows wet with sobs, of the life-tragedy that may be hidden behind a smile, of the secret cares, struggles and worries that shorten life and leave their mark in hair prematurely whitened, and in character changed and almost re-created in a few days.

We say sometimes to one who seems calm and smiling: “You ought to be supremely happy; you have everything that heart could wish.” It may be that at that very moment the person is passing alone through some agony of sorrow, where the teeth seem almost to bite into the lips in the attempt to keep feelings under control, when life seems a living death from which there is no relief. Then these light, flippant phrases jar upon us, and we seem as isolated and separated from the rest of humanity as if we were living on another planet.

Let us not dare to add to the burden of another the pain of our judgment. If we would guard our lips from expressing, we must control our mind, we must stop this continual sitting in judgment on the acts of others, even in private. Let us by daily exercises in self-control learn to turn off the process of judging—as we would turn off the gas. Let us eliminate pride, passion, personal feeling, prejudice and pettiness from our mind, and higher, purer emotions will rush in, as air seeks to fill a vacuum. Charity is not a formula; it is an atmosphere. Let us cultivate charity in judging; let us seek to draw out latent good in others rather than to discover hidden evil. It requires the eye of charity to see the undeveloped butterfly in the caterpillar. Let us, if we would rise to the full glory of our privilege, to the dignity of true living, make for our watchword the injunction of the supreme charity of the world— “Judge not.”

Sunglasses. They’re a small accessory that evoke a bunch of questions as to how and when you should wear them, and how you should stash ’em. To answer these burning questions of sunglass style and etiquette, we created this boss illustrated matrix. Enjoy.

Last week’s winner was Brian D. from St. Petersburg, FL. He chose the classic shades from Randolph Engineering.

My Picks This Week

Poler makes fantastic, unpretentious outdoor gear. From napsacks (sleeping bags you can wear), to tents, and stylish rucksacks and duffels, they’ll outfit you with everything you need for summer and fall camping. If you’re looking to bring back the classic hat, look no further than the offerings from Whisler. Made to order in the USA, these hats will keep their brim shape for years and years and will also have you looking like the most rugged fella around town. The Huckberry Travel Shirt — made for them specially by Howler Bros. — is a lightweight but durable garment that looks good at cocktail hour and holds up just as well on the trail.

The Prize

Any item currently available on Huckberry (up to a value of $500). Be sure to check out the current line-up of items as it changes every week.

Enter the Giveaway

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About ten years ago, in my mid-30s, I officially opened my own editorial business.

Five months later, my business officially failed.

What followed was what my wife Mary Margaret and I today call “our lean season.” We weren’t poor by global standards—we still had a roof over our heads and ate three meals a day.

But by G8 standards, we were broke. We were uncertain about how to pay our bills, in danger of losing our house, and fearful and stressed about our immediate and future financial situation.

During that winter, I applied for more than 80 jobs. I went on interviews, attended job fairs, networked with business owners, and passed out copies of my resume by the dozen.

Blame the collapse of the newspaper industry. The field was flooded with hungry, well-credentialed journalists looking for work. Time after time, the answer was no.

Today, almost a decade later, Mary Margaret and I talk with people who have experienced similar lean seasons. We have good friends, for instance, a surgeon and his wife, who tell about the few years in medical school right after their daughters were born. They lived in an apartment with rats.

This is what we learned about lean seasons from talking with others, and also from our own experience.

1. You discover you have good friends.

Some people experience financial difficulty and react by feeling embarrassed. They clam up and try to keep up appearances of financial success.

We chose to go the other direction. We openly talked about our situation with the people closest to us, seeking their emotional support and gleaning their advice.